


Triptych/this will hurt you more than it hurts me

by Pandora



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:08:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2747111
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pandora/pseuds/Pandora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A handmaiden is caught up in the consequences of her Queen's actions.  A companion story to <i>Ashmé</i> and "Lumina."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Triptych/this will hurt you more than it hurts me

The first time I saw Agent Garen Borreno, I had gone out for a wandering, solitary walk through the Royal Gardens. It was the first hour of evening, and the palace offices had all closed for the day, and the Queen had returned to her personal quarters, and the small life she was permitted to have there. She had held a tense, private meeting with the Governor and several of her advisors that morning. Aimeé had accompanied her, but she had not told the rest of us what she had overheard.  Brisaé had been on Coruscant—no, I should be safe and change that to _Imperial Center_ —for nearly a fortnight.

I hardly noticed him when I passed him on a path in one of the oldest sections.  It was opened to the public, and I had already seen several women I didn’t recognize on one of the other paths, admiring the early flowers.  He was dressed in a safe, and conventionally dull, middle class style, in a suit that had been the fashion last year, and he was too old—in his mid-thirties, or trying to look younger—for me to know him.

Besides:  my father was twenty years older than my mother.  She married him when she was eighteen—the same age I am now—without even starting on a degree.  I had seen how well _that_ worked out for her.  So I have never seen the appeal in older men.

I was standing on the freshly-raw blond wood bridge over the creek, letting the waternoise fill up my mind so I didn’t have to think, when he came to stand next to me.  “Good evening,” he said, looking out at the creek.

I returned the obligatory greeting without turning to look at him--I wasn’t dressed in my handmaiden robes, so it was all right for him to see me:  _Good evening._

He waited several minutes before he said, “You seemed worried about something.”

That would be because I was worried. I had too many reasons--the sort that I must have fretted over in the dreams I didn’t remember when I was awake—for that.  But I only answered him with a twitched shrug.  He didn’t push me; I would know soon enough that he had learned that tends not to work. Instead, he said:  “I have my own concerns.  And it seems worse when you can’t share them with anyone else.”

We stood there in silence.  The only sound was the trees in the nearby grove shaking their leaves in a small river-cold breeze.  I could have told him that I did have people to confide in.  We didn’t burden (or I often thought—though it was untrue, and unfair— _annoy_ ) the Queen with our problems.  We shared those amongst ourselves.  But we hadn’t truly talked about the problems with the Empire, and the way the Queen continued to respond to them.  I had begun to think that was because we didn’t want to admit what we knew the truth to be.

Finally I said:  “Who are you?”

“I’m irrelevant,” he said.  “But the work I am part of is not.  I’m here to look into certain matters—the same matters, I suspect, that worry you.”

“Perhaps,” I said, only risking that one emptied word.

“Are you concerned about the Queen?” he said. When I turned to nod back at him, he was as serious as we were, when we attempted to mention—even in the most vaguely hinted ways—the worries we never forgot.  “You have reason to be.”

\--

Inquisitor Mevath had started out the session by attempting to put me at ease.  I took a seat on one of the ridiculous slippery-silk pink sophas when he asked, when he told me to, and he sat down across from me.  But I had seen him in the throne room, and I wasn’t fooled. I sat in a rigid perch on the sopha’s edge, my legs clamped tighttight together.  I couldn’t relax, even when he started out by telling me, in a kinder voice than the one he had used when he spoke to the Queen, that he regretted the inconvenience.

“I want to be here as little as you do,” he said. I wondered if he was going to go on from there to ask me what my favorite novel, or boardgame, was.

It was easy to tell him I didn’t know what he wanted to hear.  I knew what everyone in the upper levels of the palace did--that the Queen wished any Jedi looking for refuge on Naboo to be welcomed here.  She was as clear as ever on that point.  But that was I did know.  I haven’t got time to remember all the things whispered in gossip.

But if I had known, if I had actually seen a Jedi for myself, I would have told him the same thing.  I felt more pure, more right, in knowing that than I think I ever shall again.

Inquisitor Mevath leaned forward, with a hard clenched-fist smile.  I could tell that he had to use more than a little effort to make himself do it. He was losing his patience with me. (And: _good_ , I thought, the word floating through my mind.)

“It’s been my experience that people often know more than they’re aware of, Caité,” he said. “Think on it.  You may have seen, or overheard, something that seemed a bit off, a bit out of place, but you weren’t quite certain of it.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

My reflection drowned into the eyepiece he wore. His other eye, the ordinarily brown one, fixed itself on me.  I looked back, but without quite seeing him.  “I suggest you give it some more thought before you decide you’re that certain.”

After another hour of that—which crawled by one slow, leaking, raindrop at a time—he stood and walked away from me, over to the table where he had set up his datapad.  He had looked, in the instant before he turned away, as though he wanted to hurt me—either through his torture-droid’s needle arm, or even by hitting me—and it annoyed him that he was this bothered by another _arrogant little girl_.

When he had called the Queen that, right in front of her face, I had known he was capable of anything.  He had rules, but they weren’t the ones we followed.

I watched him, my hands clenched together in my lap. My breath shook out when I exhaled.  I could see him now, once his voice was no longer echoing _Tell me, Caité, this may be difficult, but you need to tell me_.  He might have had odd nightmare-glaring eyes, but he was still only human. He wasn’t even really ugly. Then he turned back, and I hoped I was ready to endure whatever he wanted to ask me next.

 --

After her meeting with Moff Panaka, the Queen shut herself in her private sitting room for several hours. Sorsché told me that she wanted to be alone.  That wasn’t like her, and I did not have to ask what Moff Panaka had chosen to discuss with her. After we had our own awkwardly-silent dinner, I knocked at the closed door.  She must have been expecting that, and she did not ask me to identify myself before she invited me in.  She was sitting near the window, her hair a loosened, sleep-dull mess over her shoulders.  She had left a datapad, the screen glowing with rows of crowded black words, out on the tea table.

When I apologized she said, “Oh, there’s no need for that.  I think I’ve sulked more than long enough. I’m worse than a schoolgirl with a bad exam grade.”

She did not smile when she said that. She moved over to the sopha, and I waited for a moment before I sat down with her, and waited for her to speak. I wouldn’t have to wait long. She knew she didn’t have to keep secrets from us

Then she looked down into her lap, and played with the ring with a ragged mountain amethyst she wore on her left hand, on her marriage finger, and: “Moff Panaka is not pleased with me. I hardly need to tell you why. But he has never—spoken so bluntly before.”

“He must have felt it was necessary, Your Highness,” I said.

“I don’t doubt that,” she said.  “He told me that I truly wish to be of assistance to any surviving Jedi, it won’t help to offend the Empire, even over the smallest matter.”

I remembered my recent--and most likely, the final—meeting with Agent Borreno, and said:  “I’m afraid I must agree with Moff Panaka on that point.”

“You’re both right,” she said. “It pains me to admit this, but I should have seen it years ago. But—I cannot bear knowing we have to be a part of this Empire.  If we give up the only references to the Republic we still have left--”

“It’s only a word,” I said.  She looked skeptical, and while I couldn’t blame her for that, I could not get distracted into a discussion on linguistics.  I had to convince her she already knew what to do.  “The governmental processes inside the buildings won’t change.”

She nodded.  “That’s probably the best way to look at it.  Thank you, Caité.  I can only hope that my public servants will be so accepting.”

“I am pleased only to have served you,” I said, with the formal tone I had not used since the day I had given her my oath.  She would have understood what that meant.

 --

Later, when I only had to remember my time with Inquisitor Mevath, I kept seeing what had never happened. This time, when he came back over to the sophas, he looked at me for another moment, and then, with a disgusted sigh, hit me across the face.  He would have done it quickly, before he could feel my skin, and it would have slammed into me like a door falling shut.  My head would snap over to the side.  It would not have improved his mood.  He would have waited until I had pulled myself together before he said: _Maybe that will help you reconsider_. I could hear his voice saying it, even though it hadn’t happened.

Several days after that, his handprint would have turned into a bruise on my right cheek.  I would have borrowed the Queen’s pot of whiteface to cover it over, but I would know, even if no one else saw it, that it was still there. It would have been a birthmark stain through the frost-white makeup.  When I touched it, it would answer with a whimper of pain.

When I looked in the mirror this morning, while I was putting my hair into the style Aimeé had decided on, I was actually surprised when I didn’t see it.

\--

Agent Borreno was waiting for me on the grand steps in front of the palace.  I sat down next to him, and looked out down the avenue.  It was emptied at that time of night, with only a few loose driedbrown flower petals scattered in the torchlight.  The statues of the sister warrior-queens loomed overhead, with their proud, stonewhite, dead eyes.  I pulled my grey wool cloak tighter around me, and waited for him to speak.  I had told him that I could only manage ten minutes before one of the others noticed I was gone.

“I’m glad you were able to make it,” he said. “I just received word from my superiors this afternoon.  This will be the last day of my holiday here.”

“How many roles are you playing?” I said. I couldn’t have thought he would actually give me a truthful answer.  I must have wondered what he would tell me.

“That would be telling,” he said. “But I have never had more than three of them at once—and I couldn’t tell you which one wasn't an act. That may be the best reason agents should not marry.  Spouses have a tendency to want to know who you are.”

“I didn’t say we aren’t permitted to marry,” he said.  The shadows of the statues stretched out across the avenue, and I could hear a streetcleaner whine off in the city.  “I don’t have any actual figures, but based off my observations, I would say most of us do.  People have a tendency not to make the best decisions.”

Then:  “I am known in my other persona for my devoted work habits.  I will try to excuse myself away again, but I can’t make any promises.  Regardless, I hope you will continue to consider what we’ve discussed.  I trust you will know what to do, handmaiden.”

He still didn’t know what my name was. I would have told him if he had only asked, but he never had.  “I have no doubt that I will,” I said.

After another minute, he stood up, and I did the same.  My skirts were still cold from the icehard stone step.  “Good night,” he said, with one last nod.

He walked down the steps into the avenue. When I looked back, just before I returned to my place inside the palace, I couldn’t tell he had ever been there. The only movement came from the petals shaking into a dance in the new, and suddenly brightly cold, breeze.

 

*


End file.
